Category: electronic cutters

Life has been pretty busy around here. My Mom always wants to stitch and needs someone to help her with pressing and trimming. She only has enough energy to stitch about an hour and a half, so while she’s resting, I am doing other things. We have made enough blocks for a couple of quilt tops, but haven’t put them together yet.

I have also been doing a little blogging about machine embroidery for the Craftsy website. That has really kept me busy, but is expanding my horizons. I’m learning new things just from writing about machine embroidery. This is a project that I posted on the Craftsy blog this week.

And —ta da– I’ve been experimenting with a number of new cutting tools. Do any of you have a Silhouette Cameo, Slice, eClips, or other blade type cutting machine? Most people use them for scrapbooking, but I have had a lot of fun cutting fabric with them. At first I had a hard time with fabric, but have learned a few things along the way. So far, this is what I know.

Use iron-on fusible (I used Wonder Under), peel the paper off the back of the fabric before you stick it to the mat. The mat itself is sticky, so you just have to lay the fabric in the right place on the mat and adhere is by rubbing with your fingers and you’re ready to cut. If you have cut with one of these machines, how did you prepare the fabric? Is one kind of fabric better than another? So far, it seems to me that batiks work really well and lower thread count fabrics, not as well.

I’ll talk more about this kind of cutter as I experiment and will write some instructions for things I have learned. Here’s one of my first test projects. My grandsons are really into superheroes. I couldn’t find t-shirts anywhere with superhero logos, so I made my own using a Silhouette Cameo cutter, Embird digitizing software, and MaketheCut cutting machine software. The stitching around the parts of the logo are a simple zigzag which I digitized with Embird. But, one could stitch this down with a regular sewing machine zigzag stitch too. This was very simple to do. Now, I have to find time to do a second one since they’re twins.

This is really neat that there are new tools (or at least new to me) that will cut applique. However, I will never, ever, give up my AccuQuilt die cutter for piecing quilts. Isn’t it wonderful that we have all these wonderful tools?